Things to do / Travel Guide
Address:1390 E Presidents Circle
Salt Lake City, Utah
Tel:
(801) 581-6927
The Utah Museum of Natural History contains a massive collection of natural history permanent exhibits, covering over 23,000 square feet. These displays include detailed dioramas, designed in the museum's early days, of Utah's untouched natural wild habitats, and new cast moldings of freshly unearthed dinosaur bones!
At the Utah Museum of Natural History you'll find constantly updated and expanding new exhibits. The museum staff recently won the 2006 Exhibition Award for Experience Design (from the American Association of Museum Excellence) for their hard work on "The Dark Zone: Discovering Utah's Caves."
Located on the first two floors of the George Thomas Building in the University of Utah, the museum's exhibits cover three basic areas of natural history: Paleontology, where you'll find the reconstructed dinosaurs and displays on geology; anthropology, where you can find where we, as modern humans, come from; and biology, where you'll find where life on this planet came from, and how it evolved.
Some current features of the museum include Tony Taylor collection, with ethnographic highlights, a fascinating archaeological study of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Utah and the greater Great Basin/Colorado Plateau area, and four assembled cast skeletons from dinosaurs found in Utah! You and the whole family can even take part in the museum's hands-on dinosaur dig!
The first Monday of the month is Free Family Mondays, and the museum stays open to 8:00pm! What a great way to spend quality time together in a fun and educational environment!
From Utah Museum of Natural History - Salt Lake City, Utah:
The Museum traces its beginnings to 1959 when the President of the University of Utah appointed a committee of faculty members representing disciplines sympathetic to the preservation of the state's natural history. Various academic departments held extensive, representative collections of anthropological, biological, and geological material dealing with Utah, the Colorado Plateau, and the Great Basin. It was the committee's aim to consolidate museum exhibits scattered around the campus in one location. In 1963, the committee successfully pressed for legislation establishing a state museum of natural history at the University of Utah.